I don't know for sure if it's genetic or not. There is always the chance that it is genetic so look and plan for that possibility but I wouldn't assume it definitely is.



Last year one of my normal females bred to an unrelated spider produced a clutch with several missing eyes and one also with a short lower jaw and some messed up even worse that didn't even hatch. The deformity and the defect free groups both included both spider and normal so I don’t think the spider mutation had anything to do with this problem.



I gave an eye deformity spider and two of her eye deformity normal sisters to a friend who was interested in them but he reported they all died so in our case the deformities may have included internal problems. The two eyed spider female I kept is still doing just fine.



Sure there could be a recessive gene that these unrelated animals both happened to have but I'm also considering that there could have been some sort of environmental problem, perhaps even including temperature extremes before the eggs where even laid. I'll keep an extra eye out (no pun intended) for any further problems with my girl's eggs or her decedents but with no further evidence against them I'm not ready to cull the line from my collection and if I had kept the one eyed spider and she lived I might have breed her too if I couldn’t find any evidence to support the cause being a genetic defect.

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